


Fierce Like Floating Embers

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: Car Sex, Dirty Talk, First Time, Frottage, M/M, johnny is a shameless flirt, misuse of county property
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 11:03:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2022717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roy, confounded by Johnny, in the Squad in the dark on a hillside outside the city of Los Angeles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fierce Like Floating Embers

Johnny is a flirt. He is an _outstanding_ flirt. If it’s human and of age, Johnny’ll slick them down with those sweet doe eyes and get as goofy as a teenager. Sly he is not. Subtle he is not. Successful he is most assuredly _not._

But he’s really spectacular at the flirting part. Girls, and women, think he’s adorable, and as far as Roy can tell from the sidelines, it’s gotten the scrawny kid out of more than a few scrapes, and probably into just as many. Johnny is the boy who ended up on the school roof after charming some senior’s pretty girl. He doesn’t mean to do it - most of the time. It’s just like this thing he can’t turn down, like a car’s blinkers permanently stuck in emergency flash. Always with the crooked smile and the eyes much too big in his thin, pretty face. 

Roy shouldn’t call him pretty. It’s not right to call a man pretty, after all, but face the facts, that’s what Johnny is. He’s missing all the appropriate parts that Roy should find attractive, but he’s pretty, and there’s too many times that Roy just can’t take his eyes off him. There’s times - on the job, in particular - when Johnny relaxes, when his body seems to settle into itself, when he’s beyond competent and Roy wants all the nurses who think he’s a gibbering fool to look at him then, because they’d be all over him in half a second. 

Hell, Roy would be, and Johnny is not what he should be calling attractive. Roy chalks it up to spending half his week with him, day in and day out, hours shoulder to shoulder, back to chest, Johnny stealing his food and Roy just giving up and making more, like they are just parts of the same person walking around propped up with two brains. Johnny would have been the last person most would’ve compared him to, the last person that anyone would’ve guessed he’d be partnered with. 

Even Captain Bailey, from 10s, had given him a reluctant eye when Roy had asked about Johnny. All the rescue men, as it happened, but Bailey’s eyes had slid sideways on Gage’s name and Roy insisted - this was before he knew him, and when he did, well. 

"Are you sure? Him too? He’s awfully - " So many words hung there. Young. Scrawny. Stupid. Pretty. Hot-tempered. 

"All of them," Roy had said, at the time because he was desperate to recruit.

And then there was Johnny in his office asking pointed questions with wary eyes, and then there was Johnny at the hospital during the program, bright and eager to learn and driving Brackett all but to drink with his inquiries. 

And then there was Johnny, at the station, sucker-punch pretty eyes and no self-control.

Roy should not be angry, when Johnny’s latest nurse slides a finger along his jaw and puts that dope-fiend smile on his face. His stomach should not lurch, when Johnny folds his tongue back into his mouth, when his eyes lower and follow the nurse’s pert backside down the hall. 

He isn’t angry he truly isn’t it’s just the lurch, the gnarling in his stomach like too much coffee too early, it’s Johnny, and his pretty eyes and his flirting tongue that dares his lips to part and smile. He should not think Johnny is pretty. He absolutely should not not even in the graveyard dark think Johnny is beautiful but when the streetlights peer in through the slatted blinds in the bunkroom and stroke his crooked nose and his slack, sleek body it’s hard not to believe Johnny was made somewhere of fire and a long horizon, and the line of him from elbow to hip is like the wailing of a siren in the distance. 

Roy gives up but only halfway: Johnny is beautiful in the dark, biting his bottom lip softly as if he is dreaming probably of pretty girls who won’t turn him down, Roy wouldn’t turn him down either but that’s more than half, that’s more than Roy’s willing to give up. Johnny is beautiful in the dark and the cat-eye light of the streetlamps on the highway to the roar of traffic and Roy will dream of him but that’s ok, the dreaming isn’t his fault, it’s only because of Johnny, who flirts with everyone, even Roy. 

Roy believes that Johnny doesn’t know what he’s doing because there is no other option that isn’t darkness, and dreaming, and something like tenderness cradled in rough hands like the intimacy of breathing and bleeding and sweating and dying.

Johnny sleeps like a child, as if he’s thrown himself headlong into the deep which is dreaming, and Roy wakes sweating and in a state he should not be in while on duty. Johnny’s face is soft and sweet. He looks very young. He does not look like he has been elbow deep in the guts of an accident victim (industrial, bakery, who would’ve thought a mixer could get that big, or what it could mix?) he looks like a sixteen year old boy, making pretty thoughts of pretty girls like butterflies flitting along his brain cells, somewhere behind his eyes. 

Johnny is closer to sixteen than Roy is, and Roy isn’t sure if that makes it worse, of if it’s just part of the package of Johnny being pretty and bright-eyed and flirtatious and stupid and sweet and fierce and loyal. If maybe it’s all wrong and doesn’t matter one way or another, like getting your sweaty adolescent palms on a skin magazine didn’t matter a few missing pages one way or another. Roy itches sometimes to grasp the edges of Johnny’s sweetness and shove it aside like a blanket on a summer night, where the body holds the breath of the soul and the sweat hovers on the skin, afraid to evaporate. What would he find beneath soft skin or would it be soft at all, would it be stretched taut, would it tremble to the tongue. 

Roy’s dreams are not a solution to this problem. Johnny is still beautiful in the dark and Roy would take him, if he could, grasp whatever is left vulnerable in him and skin it back and bite down on his grin and open him up and touch his fierce heart like embers in the black pre-drawn sky. Roy’s dreams don’t help, they gore him awake like mad star-born bulls, and he sweats without cooling, and Johnny is beautiful.

Johnny has no right to be. Roy has seen him sprawled, contorted, conniving, unconvinced, mad, aggrieved, hungry, hurt. Johnny has no right to be anything but human but maybe that’s what makes Roy’s hands itch so. So bad. So awful. So wanting. 

In the dream Johnny is in the Squad and his eyes are the gleam of desert heat and the tongues of foxes, and a bead of sweat slips down his yearling neck, and he says, whatcha doin’, Roy, as if he doesn’t know.

Roy does not consider himself especially creative. He is not _imaginative_ , not the way that Johnny is, not the way Johnny is always bounding thought to thought and skipping the sensible steps behind the process. There is a logic there, there must be, Roy doesn’t always see it but he accepts it because when he is not outright crazy or simply getting into trouble Johnny is deftly smart, Johnny is clever.

Johnny would know the way he’d like to be touched, Roy thinks. Not that Roy thinks he’s a queer or something but just because he’s a flirt, because he’s pretty, because maybe those senior boys in high school chased him up a tree not because he made eyes at their girls but maybe at them, maybe, like the way he does when he’s got a scheme cooking maybe Johnny and his gutwrenching soft eyes wanted something that he didn’t know how to have. 

Roy does not imagine the available possibilities. He’s seen the clinical permutations of the human imagination, red-faced and ashamed, red-faced and still hot around the edges. It’s not their problem to judge, not their law to enforce. Sometimes men get into fights. Sometimes they get into compromising positions. Sometimes they get sick. Sometimes someone is misty-eyed and hard-jawed and that someone isn’t the wife, it’s the neighbor, it’s the best friend, it’s the one you wouldn’t imagine.

Roy could never have imagined, when he was young and fingering the creases of his first uniform, what he would see as a paramedic, he could not have imagined paramedics at all. Like the light between night and dawn, like the shadow between streetlights, like the darkness past the vainly hopeful reach of flashing neon, like a dream or a miracle to say here in your hands you will stop time, you will sop blood and steady hands and shock hearts back to life. Here is the part where you hold the breath of life and hold it tightly in your chest and deliver the half-alive and almost-dead to the doctors. Where twenty, ten, five minutes mean everything. Here is the walk like a tightrope don’t fuck it up. Roy could not have imagined. He leaped at the chance and took it to the teeth and spread the gospel like God in blue and silver had ordained him, set a fire in his ribs. 

And there was Johnny, who skidded up against this madness and crept around it as if it would bite. Roy would take Johnny in his teeth, too. Would share that fire.

Out on a ridge the setting sun sucks the heat from the air like venom and the wind is a rattlesnake warning. Johnny sprawls in the cab like this is a dream and the last rays catch his skin and his hair and his eyes, and his eyes are gold and fire, how did Roy never notice the gold before, the way the light gets in and boils Johnny’s mad smile from the inside. Johnny’s chest rises and falls rises and falls.

"Whatcha doin’, pal?"

"Hold still."

" - why - "

Roy is wordless, Roy is punctuation to the whisper-dark, to Johnny’s startled gasp, to the half-groan that licks the inside of his mouth, and his teeth graze the softness of a lip and the tight line of a throat, his eyes shut, Johnny grabbing at his collar. 

Oh. Oh. Whatcha doin’, partner?

"I’m sorry."

"Why?"

"I didn’t mean - "

"Bullshit you didn’t."

Do it again. Again. Over again.

Johnny knows how to be quiet when it’s important, when you give his heart and his brain and his hands something to do. He’s all fire in his valves and ventricles, the scratch of a matchstick on brick lighting up a cigarette lighting up the eyes behind it, the hand that shakes the ember and the smoke. It’s not that he’s quiet, maybe, just that he talks in another way.

Johnny, bored, is by turns dangerous and ridiculous. Johnny, bored, without direction, is Johnny duped and dumped by nurses, is Johnny with his tongue tangled in his brain and his pride scraped. When a pretty girl dumps him, everybody knows it. It’s not like when something goes wrong somewhere in that stop-gap slow-down panic between the call and the scene and the hospital, when shit gets serious, when Roy sees him in the purgatory of after, sinking into the Squad’s bench seat like he’s becoming part of the seams, like if he doesn’t he’ll come undone. He says nothing.

In the Squad, on a ridge at the edge of the county, the smell of dust deep in their lungs and sweat, the trailing edge of a sunset, Roy’s face in Johnny’s throat, his tongue to the pulsepoint. Johnny not saying a damn word. Breathing hard but trying not to.

Whatcha doin’, Roy?

Johnny’s hand loosens from his collar, and his long fingers touch Roy’s nape in the soft hair where the barber’s razor cleaves so gently to the ridges and curves where the blade sits soft and tender. Roy sometimes wonders if Johnny knows what a comb is, nevermind a barber. 

Under his collar. The crest of his spine where it meets his neck. His lips move on Johnny’s skin. Johnny makes a noise that’s just a breath riddled with unspoken things. Whatcha doin’. He isn’t saying stop. He isn’t saying, stop, Roy, cut it out, Roy. 

Johnny isn’t saying a goddamn thing which means shit is serious and he’s made a mistake and this might be limbo or straight hell, the light is broad and red enough as it leaves the hillside behind for the distant horizon, for the ocean, to bleed on the breakwater rocks. It strikes him funny now, strikes him mad as Metropolitan after midnight, how many times he’s been so close to Johnny, shoulders under chests and arms over backs and feet tangled together close enough to say good god when we get back to the station brush your teeth or next time cool it on the onions. 

Johnny ate four hot dogs for dinner and each one had something different on it and his breath is terrible but it’s ok the only one around to care is Roy and Roy doesn’t care because he had the same thing or rather half the same thing, he could’ve had three but Johnny was still hungry and there’s the mathematics of intimacy, pared down to a fraction of sunset and rising stars, and Johnny’s bright eyes lidded on the hillside in the broken-down Squad with the radio hissed and hushing. 

Johnny opens his mouth. Against Roy's. Roy looks at his boot-scuff dry-tongue beautiful eyes, where it is almost dark in the cab and the only light now that flecks them both is the distant whine of the neon city limits. Johnny opens his mouth. His fingers tremble and clench at Roy's collar, limp with sweat against his neck.

"Don't bullshit me Roy oh please don't bullshit me don't fuck around Roy please..."

"Why?"

"I can't fucking - "

"I won't."

"Please Roy."

Roy thinks of the time a ladder gave under him, and he fell onto the merciless ground and got the breath knocked out (spasm, he thinks, the diaphragm spasming, that's what it is, it locks up, you can't catch - ) his breath just out of reach and Johnny shouting his name and the sound of dry grass crunched beneath the decision to hurtle forward or skid back. Johnny's eyes held that decision then like the smoke in marbles, looking at him, later, and now, now he sees that same suspension of time and hope on Johnny's face, and he is so beautiful, that's not the word he needs or means, but he is, he is. 

"I'm not fucking with you."

"Really?" 

Roy has his pretty partner backed up bodily against the passenger door of the Squad. 

"Really."

Johnny sort of melts against him like a cat in August, opening up and giving in and rolling his head back and Roy would score his neck a hundred times, give him something to stammer about to the lovely girls and the clever nurses, and the crew would tease him about and it would drive Roy insane to hear it, but he's at the jaws of madness already here on the ridge of a hill alone when they should be listening to the radio for a call for someone in distress or despair something that will fracture and spill the fragile tension between them.

What is in him, what he refuses to believe is arousal, snarls and bucks and begs him to lay hands on Johnny, whose arms are loose over his shoulders, whose smile is like a lazy fingertip pushing back a lock of hair, who is flirting, because he is an outrageous and outstanding flirt even in the dark with steel popping around them and the sun gone down, and Roy tells him this. Plainly.

"You're a goddamn flirt, you know that?"

"You love me." Johnny is reckless when he's terrified. He used to run. In school, when boys chased him up trees, when he won medals for it. He used to run, and Roy wants to hear his heaving breath like he's gone a hundred miles, like some figure in antiquity that ran for victory or salvation, not the sweep of a migration but a singleminded strike into the sun, the fire. 

Roy kisses him again and again, rucks his shirt up, delights in the way he trembles.

"Who'd have thought it, straight-laced white-picked-fence Roy DeSoto - "

"Roy DeSoto what."

"Just."

"What?" He grips the hem of Johnny's shirt in his fist. He could tear it. He could leave a mark. It's harder and harder to call the heat in his belly and his crotch anything but what it is. Wants to tear, wants to mark. Wants it permanent for all to see. Just let someone tease, just let someone ask. Roy reels hard from it but doesn't let Johnny's eyes slide off. 

"You want to?"

"What."

"And you think I play dumb?"

"Did you ever do it?"

Johnny snorts. The stamping, puffing yearling is back in the grace of his neck and the jut of his jaw. "'Course I done it. Lots of times. More times than you anyway."

Roy is silent. The pads of his fingers enjoy the heat of Johnny's skin. "So you've never."

Johnny huffs and says nothing which is all he needs to say really. 

"Me neither."

"I said I did."

"Huh. You also said you had a date with - "

"Shuddup."

"C'mere."

Arousal blazes inside him, like headlights turning a curve long before the driver sees the deer, the tree, the body in the road. Long before the mind reacts and brakes shrill and steel meets its match and maker. Long and longer still before the tones sound them out and the sirens howl in darkness. Like the curve of a cliff, like the crest of a hill, like the dirt and rock ridge they're parked on waiting for the radio to spit the back into reality. 

He pulls Johnny hard against him because flesh is weak, because he wants it, because if he doesn't take it now the sun will come up again and he never will, and Johnny will keep flirting and the world will keep on spinning. 

Undoing a belt one-handed is maddening but he's loathe to let go of Johnny because Johnny makes these beautiful noises when Roy's nails scrape his hip, when Roy's fingers catch in his pocket, when Roy's clumsy haste snags a button. He sweats from his neck to his waist, and they're both going to look like they went twenty rounds when they get back, but he gets his pants open at last and sighs and Johnny lays hands on his dick and oh, fuck.

"I did too do this before."

"Fine," Roy breathes. "Just fine."

"I did. I wouldn't lie about that. I was good at it. I did alright. I did - "

"Johnny - "

"Will you believe me?"

"Johnny."

Stupid crazy wild mad flirt. Johnny grins. His teeth are white as graveyard marble against the shadows. He bares his mouth open. Open wide. He says, "I sucked a guy's cock when I was at 10s. I did. It was real late at night and we were in the locker room and he says Johnny, why not? So I says, alright. I sucked him off."

Johnny is jerking him slowly. Roy doesn't know what to do with himself. He braces against Johnny's body and grips the edge of the bench seat until he feels like he's going to rip his fingernails out. 

Flirt. Flirt does not begin to cut it. Oh, jesus fuck.

"I didn't swallow, though. I didn't like him that much."

" - Johnny - "

"I like you, though," Johnny sighs. "I really do. I been thinkin' about that since I signed the application. I been thinkin' about that a while."

Words escape him. He growls. Or groans. It would seem undignified but Johnny's voice is so soft and so lazy and so beautiful. The click and rustle of belt and zipper being undone. Roy is touching Johnny. Touching him there. Roy has never done this before. Roy does what he would want, what Johnny is doing to him. He arches his back and shoves his shoulder against Johnny's, almost straddling him. There is not enough room. They sweat. They breathe each other's words. Johnny keeps talking. 

"I been thinkin' I'd swallow you. I'd even let you pull my hair. I like that. I mean. I'd like it if it was you. 'Cause I like you, and all that. You tellin' me what to do."

"You never - " Roy's voice slips again from him, " - never do what I tell you." He is gnawing on a laugh. 

"Tell me."

"Keep going."

"Tell me what to do."

Scrawny bastard he loves him. "Keep doing what you're doing."

Johnny giggles. "You can't even say - "

Roy strokes Johnny faster, fervently, tickles the underside of his dick and Johnny makes this noise like something gives way and thumps his head back against the doorframe so Roy bites at his very much appealing neck and says, "I don't know what I want to do to you. I want to fuck you. I don't even know what that means - "

Johnny's hand moves on him. 

" - I don't, I - I'll do it, I want to fuck you, grab your hair whatever you want, pal, oh God, you goddamn - son of - a - "

He puts his head against Johnny's sweating shoulder and his body turns to white noise and nightsounds, and he licks Johnny's neck, gasping. Johnny's hiccuped moans sound distant, indeterminate, like someone closing and door and going down stairs after midnight. Roy thrusts his hips against him a few more times, clinging, clawing for that feeling inside him not to leave, not to unwind so fast, like a snake uncoiling and making haste for the shade. Johnny languises. Johnny's come is slick and turning sticky on his hand. His partner licks his fingers. Outrageous flirt.

Roy is none too sure how long they're tangled, long enough to notice, not long enough to care.

The engine is cool, the gravel is still, the wind is low, catching in the scrub, and the radio crackles softly.

"Oughta get home."

"Yeah."

"Cap'll take a stripe off us."

"I bet we missed dinner."

"You'd know."

"I'm hungry."

"You're always hungry."

"Yeah, aren't I?"

" - jesus, Johnny."

Johnny laughs. Roy peels reluctantly away from him. He shivers, marbles in his bones and quicksand in his muscles. He shakes himself. Awake. Johnny is still beautiful still lounging on the passenger side of the Squad but his eyes dart, nervous, and low.

"We could do that again, sometime?"

"Anytime."

Roy touches the keys a moment and turns and says, "We're alright?"

Johnny is zipping his pants and fumbling his belt back into place. "We're alright."

The engine grumbles and heaves to life and Roy puts the Squad in gear and takes them down the hillside to the scathing city lights and damns their neon judgement they have nothing, the city, the county know nothing, they are empty husks of moths and whiskey bottles with just two drops left, they are wordless in the night, and Roy loves Johnny without words like a body hitting cold water under a railroad trestle, or names entangled on the limbs of a tree.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Harrimaniac27 on tumblr


End file.
